I can answer from experience. I recently did a water fast for seven days to try and reset my overactive immune system. (My goal is eventually to get off arthritis medication.)
When I started the fast, I expected it to be the most difficult thing I have ever done and that I would feel weak and have a hard time concentrating and acting normally on my job and be dangerous to drive. At the time I was working in a media design, teaching interns and editing video or doing graphic design at other times in addition to teaching English as a second language in my spare time. I also lived in a house with a bunch of other housemates and we would be on a rotating cooking schedule where one of us would have to cook the noon meal for everyone, on average of once a week.
I started the fast on a Sunday morning. I had eaten normally up to that time, and so when Sunday morning rolled around, I simply didn’t eat any breakfast. By the time noon rolled around, I was quite hungry, so in order to keep myself from breaking down, I made a cup of ginger tea with lemon juice and drank that while the rest of my house mates enjoyed their lunch. An hour or so past lunchtime, the hunger went away, until it got close to supper time.
The first two or three days were the worst with hunger pangs at every meal, but usual, y I avoided temptation by staying in my room while everyone ate. I was surprised at how much energy I had, and how clear my brain was. I couldn’t remember any time I had felt so good. I slept deeply at night and felt like I needed less sleep. I was no longer dragging about and was able to keep a regular schedule at work and even continue ice skating and walking about the city as normal. Sometimes I had a little cramping in my calf, but that wasn’t particularly out of the normal for me. And even though it had been two weeks since I had taken my medicine, by which time I normally would start to experience the symptoms of my arthritis, i was pain free an more mobile than ever.
By day four, I didn’t really care whether I ate or not. I no longer felt hungry. By the end of the 7th day, I was craving something to chew, as I am more about the texture and chew factor than hunger most of the time, but even when it was my turn to cook on the sixth day of my fast, I didn’t really feel any desire to taste my food. I had thought that I would be unsafe for driving, but because I felt perfectly alert, I decided to drive myself to church.
I only decided to eat simply because I knew fasting wasn’t sustainable in the long term. Would I do a seven day fast again? Yes, I would, and I plan to do one at least once a year and practice fasting for one day out of the week most weeks. I’ve discovered that the human body really doesn’t need all those high calories or to eat as much as we put in, in relation to our physical expenditure. Sometimes I think that a lot of our diseases come because of us trying to keep eating the same amount of calories our harder working ancestors ate, while life keeps getting cushier and cushier for us.
A Story of my Friend, its 100% Real!
